


November Rain

by Minnow_53



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Fluff and Angst, Fluffy Ending, Friendship/Love, Getting Together, M/M, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), Medical Procedures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-04
Updated: 2020-09-04
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:13:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26282458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Minnow_53/pseuds/Minnow_53
Summary: When a healing spell goes wrong, Sirius is scared that Remus is going to die. While Remus is being treated, Sirius realises how much he means to him.
Relationships: Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 2
Kudos: 70





	November Rain

**Author's Note:**

> First published on LiveJournal 10/5/05. Thanks to Asterie for the beta and Guns N' Roses for the title.

For one awful moment, he thought Remus was dead.

The world froze around him: the wet, grey sky outside the window seemed turned to stone, and the voices drifting up from the common room hung suspended on a single note; the warmth of the fire in the dormitory ceased to penetrate bones that felt colder than ice. He was rooted to the spot, gazing down at the white, white face, eyes closed, almost sculptural in its perfection.

Then, he saw the blood.

After that, everything was a blur of action, as he instinctively tore a strip from the sheet and bound it as tight as he could around Remus’s arm, before rushing down to the common room, where he heard his own voice yelling ‘Fetch Pomfrey!’ at the Third Year nearest the portrait hole; then, he was sitting with Remus in the dead silence and waiting, but not for long. Pomfrey appeared almost at once, conjured up a stretcher and bore Remus off to the Hospital Wing.

He stayed beside the stretcher, taking Remus’s hand on the non-injured side, murmuring nonsensical platitudes. ‘It’s okay, you’ll be okay.’ 

Remus’s eyelids fluttered and he opened his eyes for a moment. ‘I’m having a really bad dream,’ he whispered, his voice hoarse and tiny at the back of his throat.

‘Ssh. I know. It’ll be over in a minute.’

‘It’s not so bad now _you’re_ in it,’ Remus muttered, and closed his eyes again.

In the Hospital Wing, Sirius was elbowed firmly aside while Pomfrey got Remus into a bed in the corner, and conjured up opaque screens round it. He knew he should leave, let them get on with it, but he hung round anyway. Nobody noticed him, because they were too busy bustling round Remus, doing whatever strange healing things they needed to do behind the screens.

Eventually, he caught the sleeve of one of the young nursing aides as she went past. She liked Sirius, and always blushed when he came to see Remus after the full moon. Once, when Sirius caught a bad cold and was sent to the Hospital Wing for an afternoon, she was so overwhelmed that she kept her head ducked all the time he was in there, and her hands shook when she gave him his Pepper-Up potion.

‘Excuse me. But Lupin…how is he?’

The little nurse didn’t blush today; she was looking too upset. ‘He...he’s very ill,’ she stammered. ‘Madam Pomfrey gave him four blood-renewing capsules, but he’s lost so much blood they didn’t work. She’s getting in a Healer from St. Mungo’s to see him.’

‘But what happened? Why’s his arm bleeding so badly?’

The nursing aides didn’t know Remus was a werewolf, though perhaps they may have suspected. They thought he was an accident-prone boy who tended to fall out of trees or into fireplaces at very regular intervals.

‘When he was here a couple of days ago, he’d got a really bad scratch down his arm,’ the nurse explained. ‘Madam Pomfrey said he’d cut right into an artery, so she put a Deep Healing charm on it. But the charm must have been faulty, so it broke, and he started bleeding again.’ She gave a little sob; well, she was very new there, only four months out of Hogwarts.

 _At least he didn’t do it on purpose._ Sirius felt light-headed suddenly, and sank down on to a chair by an empty bed. 

Obviously, just two days after the moon, it was most likely that any injuries would arise from the wolf’s claws. But of course, that wasn’t a given. The Muggle Studies group was learning about an action called suicide, the rough equivalent of hexing yourself with your own wand. They’d read case histories of people who poisoned or shot themselves, or cut their wrists. For the past hour, hanging round the Infirmary, staring unseeing through the big windows, Sirius had been terrified that Remus might have decided he could no longer bear to be a werewolf, and tried to end his own life in this messy, Muggle fashion.

The last change had been hard for Remus, even with his friends present. The autumn and winter months were always bad, especially a November like this one, when the constant rain seemed to make the endless nights even longer. Of course, moonrise and moonset were controlled by forces other than the clouds and the early dusk, but it didn’t feel like it at two o'clock on a full moon afternoon, when Remus was sitting in Transfiguration with his fists clenched and his eyes dark with apprehension, already living, Sirius knew, the evening to come. He’d flick his wand and a peacock feather would become a purse, and Sirius was sure he was wishing that his monthly ordeal could be as easy. It seemed so unfair that the wolf was without consciousness, but the boy becoming the wolf could remember every bone-shattering, muscle-stretching second of the transformation itself.

In the common room after school, Remus had hardly eaten any tea, though it was his favourite chocolate biscuit cake, and he waited in the dorm for Pomfrey afterwards curled up tightly on his bed, responding only in monosyllables to his friends’ jokes and attempts to cheer him up.

‘We’ll be along right after dinner,’ James promised. ‘The Forest’ll be fun in the rain. We can shake the leaves and try to drown Wormtail.’

Peter laughed gamely. ‘Sure, Prongs.’

Sirius sat on Remus’s bed and put a reassuring arm round him. ‘It’ll be fine Moony. You’ll enjoy it once we’re there. You always do. You just can’t remember.’

Remus relaxed a bit, and tried to smile. ‘I don’t have a good feeling about it. That’s all.’

Thinking back, Sirius gave a shiver. So Remus hadn’t done anything stupid and Muggle. Well, of course he wouldn’t. But what if he’d had a premonition of his own death? The deep gash in his arm had occurred not long before sunrise, when the wolf, herded back to the Shack after a wonderful night in the rain and the wind, managed to break a pane of glass trying to escape. The wound was still dripping blood when Remus transformed back, but his friends in their Animagus forms didn’t especially notice; even the dog was used to the tang of blood on full moon nights. It was part of the wolf’s scent, not exactly homely or reassuring, but omnipresent. 

The boy in the Shack that morning had needed a lot of healing, but reappeared in school the following day looking pale but not sickly.

‘Mr Black!’ Madam Pomfrey stood in front of Sirius now, her expression outraged. ‘What d’you think you’re doing here? Come on, off to lessons with you!’

‘I was just waiting to hear…the nurse said Lupin was still bleeding a lot.’

Pomfrey’s face softened. ‘The Healer’s going to be along any second. Mr Lupin will be fine. Now, off you go. You can come back at break.’

Sirius was twenty minutes late for Potions, but Professor Slughorn, who was decent for a Slytherin, merely said, 'Try not to miss half the class next time, Black.' He slid into place beside James, who hissed, ‘What the hell’s going on? Someone said Moony’d been rushed to the Hospital Wing.’

Sirius explained, and then Peter left his cauldron simmering and had to be told too. ‘Wow. Some of the Gryffindors said he was dead. They said that Sirius ran down into the common room screaming.’

‘Well, I did,’ Sirius said, defensive. ‘I thought he was just skipping breakfast to get a bit more sleep, and then I saw him – ’

Professor Slughorn said, ‘Black, Potter, I expect a perfect Headache Cure Potion by the end of the lesson.’

When his back was turned, Sirius scowled and waved his wand over the cauldron. ‘You got it, you bastard.’

‘Sirius! That’s cheating!’ James said, scandalised.

‘Tough.’ Sirius suddenly realised he was really angry, for some reason, and turned away. James put a comforting hand on his shoulder. ‘Hey. Padfoot. He’s going to be fine.’

‘We don’t know for sure,’ Sirius said, when he could trust his voice again. ‘They’re getting a Healer in, Prongs. Pomfrey’s never done that before.’

‘She did,’ Peter butted in. ‘The time that Muggle-born girl had, er, pendicitis. And she went to a Muggle hospital and they did something – ’

‘Shut up, Wormtail,’ James growled, sounding almost like Padfoot for a moment. ‘Nobody’s going to take Moony to a Muggle hospital. Specially not if he’d need to be there over the full moon.’

Peter giggled at that, and returned to his cauldron and his virtuous headache potion, achieved without external help.

At break, Sirius rushed straight up to the Hospital Wing, not stopping to wait for the other two. In fact, he called back over his shoulder, ‘Get me a roll, Prongs! I’ll eat it in Herbology.’ Pupils weren’t allowed to bring food anywhere near the plants, but the other two didn’t bother reminding Sirius; he’d get told off soon enough.

The Hospital Wing looked dimmer and darker than ever to Sirius in his gloomy mood. The rain beat relentlessly against the windowpanes, and seemed to be streaming inside them as well. It was cold and damp, even with the vast fireplaces, and for a moment Sirius’s Gryffindor courage almost deserted him, and he decided he couldn’t face Pomfrey or the young nurse, because they were bound to have bad news.

But he pulled himself together, held his head high and crossed the threshold into the Infirmary purposefully, then stopped dead when he saw Professor Dumbledore was there, with two people he recognised as Remus’s parents. He didn’t know them the way he knew James’s parents, of course; he’d once spent a few days at Remus’s over Christmas, and he found the Lupins a bit unapproachable, a bit aloof. ‘It’s because you’re a Black,’ Remus had eventually admitted, uncomfortable, and it was a revelation to Sirius that the Blacks could be as undesirable to other wizards as non-purebloods could be to the Blacks. It made him doubt his status, his place in the world, for a while before he actually abdicated from it.

He shrank back, hiding in the long shadows cast by the lamps, but they were too preoccupied to notice him anyway. Remus’s mother’s face was distorted, and Sirius realised to his horror that she was trying not to cry.

_Oh, shit, he’s dead, he really is dead this time._

‘You can come and sit with him,’ he heard the Headmaster saying. So Remus wasn’t dead after all. Still shocked, he leaned against the wall, struggling to control his breathing.

For some reason, he remembered the moment nearly a year ago, when he’d also been visiting Remus in the Hospital Wing, this time to tell him that he’d sent Snape to find him, and revealed his secret. That had been a brighter day, because it was snowing, and even the hospital wing seemed more cheerful with the white light from outside pouring through the windows. It had been a good day, in the end, because Remus had been _all right_ , at least, in a way he probably wasn’t now: he’d been hurt and shaken, but conscious. He’d listened to Sirius’s explanation, and told him it was okay, that he understood. 

For a couple of weeks afterwards, Remus had been a bit aloof, rather like his parents. But then James and Sirius started planning a brilliant prank to cut off all the lighting in the Potions dungeons on the day Severus Snape, as star pupil, was due to give a lesson. Remus had been drawn into the project in spite of himself, and soon things were back to normal.

After that, Sirius started taking special notice of Remus, perhaps because he’d taken such a crazy risk with his friendship. He wanted to please him, to make sure that he didn’t screw up again, to show Remus that he valued him and was sorry. He didn’t care about Snape, not in the slightest, but he’d never intended to upset Remus. 

He was quite surprised, once he started thinking about it, how much he and Remus had in common, how many things they did together. Though he and James had pranks and Quidditch and twin souls, he and Remus had work, and books, and a fascination with certain aspects of the Muggle world, like cinemas and pubs and the way Muggle social life worked: not unlike wizarding social life, but Sirius was used to formal soirees at his parents’ house, not riotous parties of the sort that non-wizarding teenagers attended. He and Remus probably knew more between them about the theory of Muggle life than any of the other pupils in the NEWT group.

He found that Remus had a very calming effect. Though Remus could be tense and on edge, especially before the moon, he was still a lot steadier than Sirius in many ways. He listened, too, in a way James didn’t, unless you were telling him a tidbit of gossip about Lily Evans. He could give reasonable advice about how to cope with nasty owls and Howlers from irate parents and miscellaneous Black family members, who felt it their duty to try and bring a renegade heir back to the fold. It was Remus who showed him how to fold the parchment of the vitriolic letters into strange and beautiful shapes, turn their ugliness into charming likenesses of natural objects. Then, they’d destroy the roses and birds and butterflies together, aiming their wands and crying ‘Evanesco,’ at the same time, so the hated missives evaporated completely.

It was Remus who made him realise that he could find another boy beautiful. When Remus turned to him after they’d vanished another batch of origami into thin air, glancing at Sirius questioningly, his eyes anxious, his smile a bit nervous, as if maybe Sirius would turn on him and blame him for conniving to destroy Black property, Sirius would often be struck dumb just at the sight of him. It was the way he’d stared at a few girls sometimes, just the surface of them, the loveliness that shouted out to be noticed. Sometimes, he didn’t see Remus as his friend or mate, but as something slightly alien, almost too perfect. True, Remus didn’t have the legendary Black looks, but he was equally arresting, when you watched him for a while.

He couldn’t begin to list the things he liked about Remus. The way he treated Padfoot, for instance: stupid in the extreme, but he loved the way Remus would take such care of Padfoot, as if he were a real, cherished pet, fastening his collar carefully, not too tightly, grooming him when his fur had got tangled after a night in the forest – and those scratched, sometimes bleeding hands being so gentle as he brushed the black fur made the boy inside the dog seize up sometimes. Of course, James and Peter had also experienced being animals, so it was different for them. To them, Padfoot was simply Sirius in another form. Only Remus seemed to see him as a real dog, separate from the burden of being the rebellious Sirius Black.

He looked out of the Infirmary window at the unceasing rain, and his vision blurred for a moment. He wasn’t going to think it even. He wasn’t going to imagine the terrible waste of his friend, his golden friend who always looked as if he might shatter; he didn’t want to envisage Remus broken forever, fallen to dust. To moondust.

He blinked violently a few times when he felt a hand on his shoulder. ‘Mr Black. I think break ended at least one lesson ago.’ He looked up into the Headmaster’s face; his eyes were inscrutable, veiled, even.

‘Oh. I was just wondering… I wanted to see how Lupin is.’

‘I think Madam Pomfrey can tell you that better than I can, Mr Black. His parents are here, so that will be reassuring to him.’ 

Madam Pomfrey appeared at his side. She looked tired and flustered. ‘Poppy, I think it’s fair for Mr Lupin’s friends to hear what’s happening with him,’ the Headmaster said.

Madam Pomfrey motioned Sirius over to her office, and asked him to sit down. Of course, Sirius remembered, she didn’t realise that Remus’s friends knew he was a werewolf, though she had to have some idea.

‘Well, we can’t do much with wizarding medicine,’ she said. ‘We can keep him alive for a while, but not indefinitely. So Mr Lupin is going to have a Muggle procedure called a, a – ’ She consulted a parchment on her desk. ‘Blood transfusion. Once that’s done, he’ll be fine. There’s a Healer at St. Mungo’s who specialises in certain areas of Muggle healing, and he’s coming along soon to give this, um, transfusion. I must say, I don’t like alternative medicine, but sometimes the unorthodox treatments are very effective, I hear.’ She sniffed. ‘It’s an expensive business, but we’re going to sue the makers of the Deep Healing charm that failed. It could have killed him!’

To his surprise, Sirius found he’d missed Herbology altogether, and was now a bit late for Muggle Studies. However, Professor Crawford didn’t tell him off, but was all concern. ‘I hear Mr Lupin’s in the Hospital Wing again. Miss Evans thought you might have some news about him.’

‘Yes. He’s going to have a Muggle thing called a blood transfusion.’

Professor Crawford was ecstatic. ‘But that’s wonderful! A simple yet life-saving process. If you turn to page 560 of your textbooks, the chapter called _Muggle Medicine: Method and Madness_ , you’ll find a wonderful diagram of the blood going through a tube. It does gurgle a bit, doesn’t it? I’m sure some of the Muggle-borns will know of someone who’s undergone the procedure. Yes? Miss Smith?’

Zoe Smith told about her aunt, who lost a lot of blood giving birth to twins and was instantly revived by the miracle of transfusion. Lily Evans knew a boy who fell off his bicycle and injured his leg and had six transfusions. Mark Harrison knew a woman whose religion forbad blood transfusions, and who therefore died after an operation. Professor Crawford then explained what an operation was – ‘You can see one being performed on page 572’ – and all in all it was a very interesting, instructive and even reassuring lesson, Sirius felt; though he did wish that the textbook didn’t have the standard wizarding diagrams, because he could have done without the sound of flesh sundering as the surgeon cut into the anaesthetised body.

At lunch, Sirius was going into the Great Hall, when Snape caught hold of his sleeve and sneered, ‘So you finally drove your boyfriend to suicide, eh, Black?’

Sirius had to count to ten to stop himself hexing Snape into a heap of quivering jelly and then smashing his face in; he kept calm by reminding himself that only a half-blood like Snape would know about Muggle things like suicide. He told himself sternly that if he lost his cool to the extent he risked losing it, he would have an immediate detention, and not be able to go and see how Remus was getting on. When he felt sufficiently in control, he hissed at Snape, ‘He isn’t my ‘boyfriend’, as you put it. You know absolutely nothing about anything,’ and pulled away from Snivellus’s slimy, greasy, grip. He performed a quick cleaning spell to remove any trace of Snape from his robes; he noticed with satisfaction that Snivellus seemed a bit taken aback that he hadn’t managed to provoke Sirius into big trouble again.

He ate lunch very fast, shovelling down mashed potatoes between telling James and Peter what was going on. ‘I have to get back to the Hospital Wing before afternoon school,’ he mumbled through a mouthful of stew.

James looked a bit hurt. ‘Hey. We’d like to see him too.’ 

Sirius hadn’t thought of that. He looked at James blankly. ‘I’m not allowed to see him. Well, I haven’t seen him yet, anyway. It’s just to ask how he’s getting on. And if there’s too many of us, Pomfrey’ll just shoo us away.’

‘Fair enough,’ James shrugged. ‘But don’t be late for Care of Magical Creatures. You’re supposed to be dissecting an Augurey with me today. And then we have to put it together and revive it, and that’s always tricky. I’m not doing it by myself, anyway.’

Sirius stood up, and put the last spoonful of suet pudding in his mouth as he picked up his schoolbag. ‘Okay. I’m off now.’

Back in the Hospital Wing, the lamps seemed a tiny bit brighter, the shadows less relentlessly dark. In the infirmary, the screens were no longer round the bed in the corner, but Remus wasn’t there either.

Sirius looked round wildly, and bearded the young nurse, who was just emerging from Madam Pomfrey’s office with two house elves and a load of empty lunch trays. ‘Where’s Lupin?’

This time, she did blush, a hopeful sign, Sirius felt. ‘He’s in the side room, because he had the Healer there.’ And then, excited, she added, ‘He had all sorts of tubes in his arm, and they did some sewing magic on him too!’

Sirius winced at the thought. ‘Can I go and see him?’

The young nurse looked dubious. ‘I dunno. You’ll have to ask Madam Pomfrey. His parents took the Floo home, because he needed to rest.’

Sirius decided that when Remus was all better, he might ask the young nurse out; make her year. Then, he mused that he didn’t really want to ask her out, but he might send her some flowers. Then, he realised that he didn’t have anything for Remus, no card or chocolates, and you weren’t allowed to perform any charms in the Infirmary without authorization, as it could interfere with healing processes.

Madam Pomfrey emerged from the side room holding a potions bottle and a spoon. She tried to frown at Sirius, but didn’t quite succeed. ‘Well, Mr Black. Your friend gave us a nasty shock, but I’m delighted to say the Muggle treatment has actually worked! He’s even managed a bit of lunch. You can pop in and say hello, if you like. But don’t be too alarmed, because those Muggles are very disorganised, and the Healer’s left some tubes and things. I don’t know how the poor souls manage, really I don’t.’

Sirius pushed open the door tentatively. Remus didn’t look that great, he thought. He was still very white and was lying motionless in the narrow bed. There was a metal contraption beside him with a transparent bag of some liquid attached to it, which seemed to be being fed into Remus’s veins via a tube or a needle. It was mind-boggling in its complexity.

He pulled up a chair and sat by the bed. ‘Hi, Moony. How’re you feeling?’

Remus broke into a big smile. ‘Padfoot! I’m sorry I gave you a fright earlier.’

‘Hardly your fault. Doesn’t all that stuff hurt?’ He gestured at the healing paraphernalia. 

‘It’s a bit uncomfortable,’ Remus admitted. ‘And I feel sort of weird, with someone else’s blood in me. But the Healer says it’ll become my own blood, though I don’t want to think about it.’

‘Have your parents gone, then?’

‘Yeah. Thank goodness. My mum gets very emotional.’

Sirius was relieved Remus hadn’t seen him earlier. ‘I didn’t bring you anything. I didn’t even know if they’d let me in.’

‘That’s okay. I don’t want anything. It’s nice that you’re here.’

Sirius smoothed back a strand of hair that was falling into Remus’s eyes. ‘I wouldn’t have left at all, except we had lessons. The Muggle Studies class are making you a big card, by the way. The Muggle way, with scissors and glue, so by the time it’s ready you’ll probably be out of here. Did Pomfrey say when you can go?’

‘A couple of days.’

‘That’s not too bad. Remember last year? When you were in for six days?’

‘That was different,’ Remus said, his voice suddenly flat.

Sirius was a bit taken aback. ‘I know, but… You’re not still brooding about it, are you? Because I thought, well. I thought it was all over a long time ago.’

‘It was. Don’t worry.’

Sirius gently lifted up Remus’s bandaged wrist. ‘What was that about sewing charms?’

Remus laughed, then said, ‘Ow. That hurts. Oh, the Healer put some sort of cross-stitch spell on my arm. Where it was cut. He said that would stop it bleeding again, or else all this strange blood isn’t any use anyway. I bet Professor Crawford would love to have been there.’

‘He would. We read about it in class. I probably know more about it than you do.’

‘Stop boasting, Sirius. You’re quite welcome to lie here with all this stuff in your arm.’

The young nurse came in and announced that Madam Pomfrey wanted Mr Black to go now, as it was lessons and Mr Lupin needed his rest. Sirius remembered the Augurey, and rushed down countless flights of steps, losing his balance on one and nearly falling three storeys down into the hall below. 

He made it to the Bestiary with moments to spare, getting absolutely soaked, as he hadn’t had time to grab his cloak. James gave him a filthy look, but relented when Sirius told him that Remus was much better. ‘We can all go and see him later. Don’t you have some Honeydukes chocolate left from the last Hogsmeade visit?’

‘Hang on. You could do with a drying spell.’ James waved his wand.

Sirius said, ‘The chocolate.’

‘Yes, but I was saving that for – ’

‘Prongs, repeat after me: Lily Evans is not about to fall madly in love with James Potter. Moony needs it more. He’s been really sick.’

‘She’s going out with me now,’ James reminded him.

‘Buy her roses. Or a diamond ring or something.’

Professor Kettleburn gave out the Augureys, with instructions for wand work during the dissection, and for the next hour Sirius tried to concentrate on wingspan and length of beak, but found his thoughts drifting back to the Hospital Wing, and Remus lying on the bed with all those horrible tubes in his arm.

It wasn’t as if he’d never seen Remus sick before. Of course, you didn’t expect to find him on a normal day lying unconscious in his own bed, his sheets drenched in what had seemed like every drop of blood in his body. But some days in the Shack, before Pomfrey arrived, Remus looked almost as white and still as he had that morning. Sirius thought he must have got inured to seeing Remus laid low every month, and it wasn’t a bad thing to reflect sometimes that his friend diced with death every full moon. Perhaps they all did, keeping him company, but somehow that thought wasn’t as desolating.

He also thought about what Snape had said: both parts of it. It wasn’t the first time Snape had maliciously paired him and Remus off. That had been part of the Prank, after all. And one reason he’d been so angry then was because Snape had hit a nerve. Once the dust had settled, Sirius had made a real effort to notice and fancy girls, but it never quite seemed worth it. He found that he simply enjoyed being with his friends much more anyway, and with one friend in particular.

There’d been a day, about a week ago, when he and Remus had been working late in the library, and gone down to the kitchen for a raid, because studying made them hungry. Remus was always very polite to house elves, thanking them profusely for the cakes and milk they provided. Though Sirius had been brought up to have beautiful manners, he never quite considered house elves to be worthy of one’s thanks. He thought how sweet Remus was, really: quaint, even. It made him smile, and when he smiled, he noticed, Remus always smiled back, as if smiling and feeling happy could be contagious. He’d suddenly felt strange when Remus did that, sort of melting inside, and he thought how very, very much he liked Remus, and how he’d want to keep him nearby forever, if he could, not relinquish him to the world when they left school the following summer.

He had an image of Remus coming to share his flat. He could picture him so vividly, sitting on the sofa reading, or making tea in the kitchen. He sometimes considered that there was only one bedroom, but that was a problem they could solve, no doubt. He didn’t like to think himself and Remus too much into that scenario, for some reason.

But say Remus actually had died, he pondered, using his wand to extract a tail feather from the Augurey. What then? He imagined himself at Remus’s funeral; Remus in a coffin, the lid slammed shut on his bright face forever. Well, it was probably easier to imagine it now, when he knew Moony was going to be okay, but it still wasn’t a vision he would ever welcome. He shook his head to banish the images.

‘Hey, Sirius, what the hell are you doing to the talons?’

‘Oh.’ Sirius looked down and saw he’d sliced the talon in half. Damn. That would be almost impossible to put back together when the bird was revived.

‘Listen.’ James’s voice sounded almost gentle, the way he might talk to Lily. ‘I know you’re really upset about Moony. Well, we all are. But of course, you’re going to be specially worried, anyway.’

‘What d’you mean?’ Sirius fought hard to stop his voice wobbling and his wand from connecting with James’s chin.

‘Well, you and Moony. Now I’ve got Lily. It’s brilliant that you’ve been able to become such good friends.’

Sirius relaxed. ‘Oh, right.’

‘And if I weren’t your best friend, I’d jinx you to pieces over that Augurey. Honestly, you’ve really messed up the wingspan measure. Never mind, we’ll have to use mine.’

Once the Augureys had been revived – James managed to mend the damaged talon as well – the two boys made their way back up to the castle through the raging wind and rain. Now afternoon school was over, James had a Head Boy’s meeting with Lily and McGonagall, and Sirius made his inevitable way up to the Hospital Wing. He could probably get there with his eyes closed, he reflected, as he opened the Infirmary door. It was dark already, and the lamps had been turned up a bit, though not a huge amount. There were two new patients in the main ward, who both appeared to be suffering from wand-burn. Presumably, they’d got into a fight.

None of the nurses was anywhere in sight. A house elf was stoking the fire, and another was sweeping the hearth with a very twiggy broom. The door to the side room was ajar, and Sirius opened it a bit more and peered in.

Remus had his own lamp, an orange-red light that flickered over his features, making him look rosy instead of deathly pale. He was lying on his back staring up at the ceiling, smiling slightly as if he were in the middle of a pleasant daydream. The metal rack and most of the tubes had gone, except for a tiny needle in a vein at the back of his good hand. 

Sirius said, ‘Hi,’ very softly, but Remus still started. ‘Oh, you gave me a shock! Is school finished, then?’

‘Yes.’ Sirius sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘We dissected Augureys.’

‘How cruel,’ Remus said. ‘I knew there was a reason I dropped Care of Magical Creatures.’ 

‘We revived them again,’ Sirius said. He took Remus’s bandaged hand in his. ‘How’s the arm?’

‘Better. It’s amazing, isn’t it? I was just thinking, I can hardly remember this morning, but now I’m feeling really fine, and want to get up.’

‘I was scared this morning,’ Sirius said. ‘And when I saw your parents there, I thought…well, that it must be really bad.’

‘It probably was,’ said Remus. ‘But you can’t stop things happening, can you? Bad things?’

‘Pomfrey and the Healer did a pretty good job,’ Sirius said. He shifted a bit, so his arm was loosely round Remus’s shoulder. ‘You know I love you, Moony? Don’t you?’ He didn’t mean to say it, but once he had, it seemed like the only thing on earth he could have said.

‘I know, Padfoot. I love you too.’

‘I mean, I really love you. Like, if anything had gone wrong, seriously wrong, I’d have felt…like I was losing someone really important to me.’

‘But you didn’t. Pomfrey says that if you hadn’t stopped the bleeding with the sheet it might’ve been too late even for the Muggle healing. You probably saved my life this morning.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’ Remus smiled. ‘But don’t make me think about Prongs saving Snape. I’m not up to that yet.’

Sirius felt weak with relief, though he wasn’t at all sure that Remus had understood his declaration of love. But it didn’t matter, because, according to ancient wizarding tradition, if he had saved Remus’s life it now belonged to him, if he wanted it. He wanted it more than anything. He would cherish it and watch over it; he would stay with Remus at every full moon, and every other phase of the moon as well. He would stand by him in times of trouble, and beside him in times of joy. Remus didn’t know yet, perhaps, that they were destined to be so much more than friends, but he would find out soon enough. He just needed time to get used to the idea. 

Tired suddenly, he laid his head on Remus’s shoulder and breathed in the scents of blood and disinfectant, soap and sweat. He briefly closed his eyes and sighed deeply: it had been a very long day. Outside, the steady drumming of the rain eased for a moment into a sound that was almost a lullaby.

**End**


End file.
